Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Friday, April 12, 2019

New series by NZ writer Ged Maybury

Once described as “our county's leading writer in this field”*,
Christchurch sci-fi writer Ged Maybury effectively disappeared after 15 years
and 12 successful children's books – two of which made the finals of the NZ
Children's Book of the Year Awards (1994, 2001).

Now he is back with his most ambitious project to date: a
six-book / 800,000-word Steampunk series set upon a bizarre “alt-Earth” where
Britain is a vast mat of hovering “skylands”, America is still a British
colony, and steamships have more in common with flying saucers than anything
else.

Drawing upon a long apprenticeship of producing well-polished
best-sellers for Scholastic, Harper Collins and Cape Catley, he now turns up
the steam (and the adult content) on a multitude of delightfully detailed
fantasy/steampunk settings riddled with mad scientists, villains, dangerous
and/or attractive antagonists and a sad series of intense (sometimes steamy)
love affairs.

'Across the Stonewind Sky' is the series title and each book
advances our straight-laced British hero deeper into various kinds of steaming
do-do the moment he flies into a curious zone called The Storm's Domain
– where airships rule, and Britain doesn't. It's the Victorian era writ large,
but it's not just a man's world. Rodney is constantly thrown into the company
of a series of competent purposeful women, some of them … how to say this: 'are
on the villain spectrum'. Maybury has already earned praise for his female
characters.

The first two books; 'Across the Stonewind Sky'** & 'Into
the Heart of Varste' are now available at: